Last week both a new Sonic and a new Mario came out. While Mario Wonder was a pretty hyped game and looked good based on its trailers, Sonic Superstars had awful trailers and wasn’t getting too much hype. When it came out though, reviews were pretty positive. But I think you should always reduce your hype when it comes to Sonic, because his post-Genesis output has not been very good with only a few examples of games that were any good at all.

So today I’m releasing 2 reviews, one for Mario Wonder, one for Sonic Superstars. And I’m starting with the worse of the two.

Also kind of a mini-review, I don’t feel like going super in-depth with this one.

So yeah, let’s go with Sonic first!

The good

The first 6 zones are pretty decent. Not the best you’ve seen in a Sonic game, but they do the job of being multi-path thing levels with some amount of exploration.

The controls and overall game feel are fine. I don’t think it’s all that off from Sonic Mania in that area.

I do like that every character has an interesting thing to them, though Amy’s double jump feels a bit weak compared to Tails literally flying.

Most of the bosses are pretty good with, I’d say, 2 exceptions in the last 2 zones. I have not played the “true ending” so I don’t know if that boss is good.

It looks fine.

The performance on PC is beyond good, running at 500fps on my computer at 1440p. If I have any complaints here, they could’ve done with some level of anti-aliasing, and man some of those textures are very low-res if you stop to look at them.

The bad

While the first half of the game is decent, the last 5 zones are total garbage. Starting at Press Factory, not a single level is acceptable as far as gameplay design. Some of the bosses still are, but man, the gimmicks in the second half of the game are insufferable.

Every time you get a Chaos Emerald, you unlock a new power. The first you get, the Clone power, is just a thing that makes a bunch of the bosses unreasonably easy. You’ll skip whole phases entirely just by using Clone. The other powers? Completely useless, except for the first power. Some of them might allow you to find medals, which you don’t need to find, and that’s about it. Almost none of them are useful at all.

Speaking of, I think one of the things that makes the last few levels especially bad is that you’re no longer looking for chaos emeralds. You can only get one emeral per zone, but most zones have, like, 6 chances. So it’s basically impossible not to get all the emeralds early. At that point, there’s literally no reason to explore levels. There’s a minigame on checkpoints if you have enough rings… Don’t do them they’re pointless. So not only are the latter levels worse, but the one interesting idea of exploring to find emeralds no longer exists.

Oh, there’s an unlockable character that becomes a dragon instead of just a normal “Super” version. If you get to an area of a level that makes you go to the background (or vice versa) you can use it to fly to an area with no ground even up to the end up a level, then you’ll die.

The not-tried

I haven’t tried the multiplayer, nor have I looked at real gameplay of it (trailers aren’t real gameplay)… but man playing the single-player makes me wonder what even is the point of the multiplayer. Sounds pretty dumb, I dunno.

Overall

Overall this game is 60$ and is not as good as Sonic 4 Episode 1, which was 15$. My recommendation to Sega is to drop the price of this game to the same amount as Sonic 4 Episode 1, because if this was released in the PS3 era, that’s what you would’ve done regardless of quality. And then maybe keep it in the oven a bit to reduce the shitness. There’s really no reason this should be a full-price game.

That should be about all I need to say, but it’s more than just that. The big problem with this game is that half of it is okay-to-good, but every level in the second half is garbage. And it has pretty poor gameplay design overall, with the powers you get being largely pointless beyond Clone making almost every boss battle a complete joke.

I absolutely do not recommend this game. Only half of it is even okay, and those parts aren’t good enough to compensate for the latter half just being shit.

The positive reviews are wrong.